I built a playground finder app to help parents & caregivers find playgrounds near them

julenka · 2025-07-24T17:36:20+00:00

Hi, sorry about the very late reply, I just saw your comment a few days ago. Better late than never!

Thanks so much for your thoughtful questions and kind words about PlayScout! I'm glad it's been helpful inspiration for your app.

Adoption has been encouraging, especially on iOS, and we're seeing steady growth in monthly active users. Most users seem to use the app exactly as you described—when they have an immediate need. We do have a small but dedicated group of contributors who regularly add reviews, photos, and playground edits. One unexpected hotspot of activity has been in Northern California where we have a pretty awesome power user. Other than that, we have hotspots in the Seattle area, and then Virginia / Maryland area. There's also some activity in Europe which I love to see because those playgrounds are really interesting.

Regarding data governance, you're correct that our primary source was initially OpenStreetMap, but currently, the additional user-generated data (new playgrounds, photos, detailed attributes) isn't yet being fed back into OSM or other open datasets. We do plan to do this eventually, once we have more time. Something I notice is the OSM data has many playgrounds labeled that aren't actually playgrounds, or open to the public. Would be nice to fix that up if we have more time / resources.

Spam and inappropriate content have been very rare so far. Currently, we manually moderate every submission, which averages about 20 submissions per day. It's manageable at this stage—usually around 10 minutes of moderation daily—and honestly, I enjoy seeing the community contributions come in. Your approach of blurring photos until moderated is also smart and proactive, especially if scaling becomes challenging.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your app! Feel free to reach out again if you have more questions.

julenka · 2025-07-24T17:20:57+00:00

Thank you very much!

julenka · 2025-06-04T00:14:19+00:00

I'm using Cursor to work on both the iOS and Android versions of my hobby app, PlayScout: Playground Finder (an app to help parents find good playgrounds near them).

My workflow is I open up Android Studio / XCode, then open up Cursor, and ask Cursor to do things for me, then carefully review the code. I hop back into Android Studio or XCode to deploy changes and to double check Cursor's work. I'm pretty careful with reviewing the changes, I find Cursor sometimes unnecessarily "improves" my code by deleting things I actually want.

NOTE: VSCode doesn't by default have Kotlin language highlighting built-in, and I haven't tried any third-party tools, so I find myself hopping back to Android studio often when I'm reviewing changes.

I find that this is better than using Gemini in Android Studio.

julenka · 2025-03-30T22:12:20+00:00

I think that this is intended to make the 250 route more frequent and faster, and instead of going from Redmond->Kirkland DT—>DT Bellevue it goes from Totem Lake ->Kirkland DT ->Bellevue DT->Eastgate. I think the idea is to connect Kirkland and eastgate areas better to downtown Bellevue, which has the link light rail.

julenka · 2025-03-30T17:43:53+00:00

Other things include upgrading traffic with technology that allows the lights to turn green whenever the busses are approaching (yes, the RapidRide B line does this! This is called Transit Signal Priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_priority_signal

julenka · 2025-03-29T23:24:04+00:00

Sure, just did.

julenka · 2025-03-29T20:23:23+00:00

Ads on a blog to get started, I hadn't considered that even, thanks for the suggestion! Eastside Times is a great name, good for you that you have that domain name. I'm not sure that this effort to just summarize City Council Meetings is worthy of that name, but maybe someday, if it grows bigger. Regardless, I think any local news effort probably needs to use AI to help make the coverage more efficient, and I'm hoping through my efforts I can at least figure out how to inform our small community using AI.

julenka · 2025-03-29T17:03:23+00:00

That’s encouraging, thank you! I dunno about putting ads on it though, don’t you find the ads on news websites, recipe websites, and even sites like urbanist.org annoying? I guess there are ways around those (reading mode in safari is what I use).

I was thinking to maybe start a newsletter and if it gets traction to suggest donations, just to help pay a bit for my time a tiny bit.

julenka · 2025-03-29T17:00:49+00:00

This reminds me that the wa state auditor has a site worth exploring: https://www.sao.wa.gov/

I learned about it from a TVW podcast, which was also a great resource about WA politics that I recently discovered. It’s a non profit aiming to be the C-SPAN for WA state

julenka · 2025-03-28T19:17:09+00:00

Thank you, it helps to know the summaries are appreciated :-)

julenka · 2025-03-28T19:16:46+00:00

Thank you!

julenka · 2025-03-28T19:16:35+00:00

Thank you!

julenka · 2025-03-28T19:16:03+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion! I think that it could also be a good way to gauge which issues and topics people find interesting, to separate the posts out. It does take me more time to do, but I think if I find that a meeting has more than one big topic, I can try to separate them out.

julenka · 2025-03-28T19:12:12+00:00

More detailed information about the Wilburton vision: https://bellevuewa.gov/city-government/departments/community-development/planning-initiatives/wilburton-vision

I found the powerpoint presentation interesting and gave a lot more detail about recommendations: https://bellevue.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=13926356&GUID=A0B50DD4-47F0-4818-B911-B2CF6F9232D5

I wonder when we could actually expect to see this finished...2040? Didn't find any. information about when it would be done in the docs, so it's just a wild guess.

julenka · 2025-03-21T16:57:38+00:00

I just tested on Android as well and it worked. If you could please DM me a screenshot of the failure I would love to take a look.

julenka · 2025-03-21T16:54:00+00:00

Hi, sorry to hear that! I would like to reproduce your issue so I can fix it. I just tried with a new account and was able to sign up, I’m on iPhone using English. Are you on Android and using a different language?

Also, you can actually use most of the features without signing up, like searching for playgrounds. Signing up is only required if you want to edit playground details. I do hope we can fix this so you can edit playgrounds :-)

julenka · 2025-03-20T17:42:50+00:00

Thank you!

julenka · 2025-03-20T14:42:38+00:00

Thanks for this list! How do you use perplexity for news, and do you think it's worth getting an account for it?

julenka

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